Content Hierarchy

By Adam | 27 Sep 2015 12:00:00

It's a good idea to be producing lots of content for your business because this is a great marketing strategy which will draw lots of people in to your website. But there are lots of different kinds of content and there is a content hierarchy which reflects what is most popular and what is most likely to be consumed by prospects. In this blog post I am going to go over the three main types of content and I shall list them in hierarchical order (starting at the bottom).

Text
This covers things like blog posts, tweets, Facebook updates and anything else which is predominantly just a block of text. Text-based content is useful because you can just sit back and write about all the ways that your business is great and how you've outdone your competitors. Having said that, it is also the kind of content which people are least likely to consume. That's not to say that nobody will read it; lots of people will! It's just that the other forms of content are more likely to be consumed.

Image
Image based content includes photographs, posters and even graphics. You can have some text on image based content, but it would be best not to include too much because then it will likely obscure the main focus of the image. These are so easy to consume because all people need to do is look at them. You might like to try sharing nice photographs of your product along with a price and your business's logo; this will both shed your product in a positive, desirable light, while also making it clear that it is a picture of something that is for sale. Images alone, without any text at all, will be just as affective, if not more so; the problem is that the less text you have, the less information you can convey. So while it may be more likely to be consumed and shared it may also be less likely to win somebody over.

VideoVideo is something that can be consumed the most easily and also something which can be the most effective because it can convey the same amount of information as text. Having said that, video based content will also be the hardest to do. Not only will you need to have filming, editing, scripting and presentation/acting skills, but also the resources needed to do those things, which won't be cheap. Likewise, you could hire people for the filming, editing and so on, but, again, it won't be cheap. So, videos are something of a luxury and you should only be producing them if you have the capacity to produce high quality promotional videos; videos of a lower quality might actually shed your business in a bad light. Don't worry if you can't make anything like that just now; keep in mind that there will be situations where people can view an image or read a blog post, but where it will not be appropriate to watch a video.

So that is the content hierarchy! Don't get me wrong, all kinds of content can be very effective and all kinds of content stand to bring in new customers, but this hierarchy just shows which things are most likely to reach new people. I hope that that will be a useful piece of information to you and that you will be able to do good work with your own content marketing.